Quotes from Bill McKibben

We hebben een vijand en zijn naam is Shell.

As your society becomes more unequal, you are more likely to be depressed." Humans, he continued, "crave connection—to other people, to meaning, to the natural world. So we have begun to live in ways that don't work for us, and it is causing us deep pain."7 If we wanted to somehow engineer

The great thing about America is, everyone has a chance to change it. Every person, every corporation, everyone is on an equal footing in this great land.

Don't think 'I can't write an anthem'—think 'The United States of America made it two centuries with a terrible anthem that no one can sing. I bet I can do better than that.

I think the system has met its match. We no longer possess the margin we'd require for another huge leap forward, certainly not fast enough to preserve the planet we used to live on.

It never stopped seeming unlikely and magical to him, the way friction just quit, and gravity turned from adversary to ally.

It made him feel old, as if he'd outlived the very climate of his life, and it made him feel mad, and it made him feel tired.

I said before that the human game we've been playing has no rules and no end, but it does come with two logical imperatives. The first is to keep it going, and the second is to keep it human.

Taken together, he said, these two lines of inquiry made it clear that the safe number was, at most, 350 parts per million.

The planet has nearly 390 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We're too high. Forget the grandkids; it turns out this was a problem for our parents.

changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide emissions are completely stopped.

Calculations by Plass (1956) indicate that a ten percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase the average temperature by 0.36 degrees Celsius. But, amplifying or feed-back processes may exist such that a slight change in the character of the back radiation might have a more pronounced effect.

Those are big holes.

They're good at this. Don't be so sure that your version of reality is better because it's newer.

The 2008 food crisis is the largest impact of climate change so far. It was caused partly by the poorly-thought-through switch to biofuels as a way of combating climate change, and partly by the drought in western Australia, which local scientists have identified as having been caused by climate change.

The Keeling Curve Courtesy the NASA Earth Observatory. NASA graph by Robert Simmon, based on data provided by the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory.   If the scientific story of global warming has one great hero, he is James Hansen, and not only because he is the most important climatologist of his era, whose massive computer models were demonstrating by the early 1980s that increased CO2 posed a dire threat.

Here's the Stanford University researcher Rosamond Naylor, who conducted some of the most recent calculations: "I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year. People could always turn somewhere else to find food. But in the future there's not going to be any place to turn."61 It doesn't get any more basic than that.

In the Sea of Japan, 500 million Nomurai jellyfish—each more than two meters in diameter—are clogging fishing nets; a region of the Bering Sea is so full of jellies that it's been renamed "Slime Bank." "Jellyfish grow faster and produce more young in warmer waters," one researcher explained.

something else created modernity, the world that most of us reading this book inhabit. That something was the sudden availability, beginning in the early eighteenth century, of cheap fossil fuel. An exaggeration? One barrel of oil yields as much energy as twenty-five thousand hours of human manual labor

more than a decade of human labor per barrel.

But we are here to tell you, in this postcard from the former paradise, that it won't happen next year, or somewhere else. It will happen right where you live and it could happen today. No one will be spared.

Before the day was out, Ben & Jerry's had announced a new flavor: Trancicle, made only with Vermont milk and maple syrup, and "bullets" of dark chocolate.

Britain's Exeter University, a scientist named Kevin Anderson took the podium for a major address. He showed slide after slide, graph after graph, "representing the fumes that belch from chimneys, exhausts and jet engines, that should have bent in a rapid curve towards the ground, were heading for the ceiling instead." His conclusion: it was "improbable" that we'd be able

short of 650 parts per million, even if rich countries adopted "draconian emissions reductions within a decade." That number, should it come to pass, would mean that global average temperatures would increase something like seven degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the degree and a half they've gone up already.